


Thunderbolts and Lightning

by alpacasandravens



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Gen, That's really it, Thunderstorms, a brief exploration of jonathan's fear of thunderstorms, set sometime nebulously after the legion of horribles but before no mans land
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-24
Updated: 2019-07-24
Packaged: 2020-07-12 14:20:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19947562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Despite having supposedly overcome all his fears when he became the Scarecrow, Jonathan still doesn't like thunderstorms, and he hates it.





	Thunderbolts and Lightning

Jonathan had never liked thunderstorms. They were messy, violent things, muted in the city where the skyscrapers cut through the clouds, but in the open country where he had grown up, they were unstoppable. Wind ripped through fields, tearing up grass and pelting the raindrops against the windows hard enough to drown out everything else. 

He’d always been scared of them, of the way the lightning cast an eerie, ephemeral glow. Sometimes it would strike earth, as close as the yard or far enough away that he could barely see its light over the horizon. Sometimes it flickered through the clouds like a spiderweb. Once, the shed in the backyard had been struck. Jonathan had sat by the window for hours, watching the structure burn through the pounding rain and flinching at each crack of thunder. 

Nowadays, Jonathan thought he should like thunderstorms. He was the Scarecrow, after all, and violence didn’t scare him. 

He liked to think nothing scared him anymore, that he had truly become one with his fear. That’s the front he put out to the world anyway, what he’d yelled to Jim Gordon in the halls of Arkham. And most of the time, he thought it was true. 

That didn’t stop him from jumping when thunder rolled through, or almost subconsciously staying away from the windows when the rain drove into them. And that was why he still hated thunderstorms, even though his current hideout in the north of Gotham was nothing like the wide-open fields he was used to. Here, the rain fell on tin roofs and puddled in dirty corners of the sidewalk, candy wrappers floating down the streets to the sewers as the rain poured. The lightning was captured in rods and funneled to the ground. The power didn’t flicker with each roll of thunder, had never once left him in the dark as the storm raged around him.

It didn’t matter.

He couldn’t work during a thunderstorm, couldn’t do anything but sit and wait for it to be over. He’d tried. The first time, he’d heard a storm approaching as he was in the middle of an experiment to increase the effectiveness of his fear gas. Determined to ignore it, he’d pushed through. When thunder crashed overhead, he knocked a beaker over and ended up gassing himself. He’d sat through the rest of the storm shivering, barely protected from the rain by the awning of the building across the street.

Jonathan would never admit it, but he was scared of thunderstorms. 

It’s funny how something so simple can completely strip away the walls people build up for themselves. It didn’t matter how many times he told himself that it was just a storm, that he had faced down objectively much scarier things in his life, that he was in no danger. He was scared, and he hated it.

Because if he was scared, that meant he hadn’t overcome his fears as he had claimed. The first sign of a storm ripped the Scarecrow mantle away from him, and Jonathan became just that - Jonathan. Scared and alone and really, just a kid. If he’d have had a normal life, he would still be in college.

He and Jerome had spent a long time in Arkham making fun of Jervis for his unwillingness to face reality, but as Jonathan watched the rain run down the windows and listened to the wind howl outside, he knew he suffered from the same affliction. He wanted to be the Scarecrow, to be fearless. Vicious. The kind of person no one could order around. And most of the time, he was. He could let himself vanish behind the mask and scythe, could gas people to gain a scientific understanding of fear. But a willingness to disappear did not mean that he actually would.

There was a man behind the mask, as much as he wished there wasn’t. And, as Jonathan pulled a blanket around his shoulders and waited for the storm to go away, he admitted it. He was afraid.

**Author's Note:**

> it's storming here, so just wanted to write a short little thing about jon and storms! feel free to leave kudos/comment if you enjoyed :) also if there's spelling/grammar stuff let me know because i wrote this in 25 minutes and it's not proofread


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